Techonomy: Innovation, AI, and Ethics

Some of my favorite sessions at the Techonomy conference earlier this month dealt with ethics, values, innovation, and how artificial intelligence has come into play in these areas.

Some of my favorite sessions at the Techonomy conference earlier this month dealt with ethics, values, innovation, and how artificial intelligence has come into play in these areas.

Human Values for a Technologized Age Techonomy founder David Kirkpatrick began the conference with a talk about the focus on the human values of technology. The first big conversation was about "human values" with Julie Hanna, Executive Chair of Kiva, who talked about technology as a democratizing force, and noted that much of the world lives on less than $2 a day. She said the "greatest form of justice is fair access."

Rev. Michael C. McFarland, Treasurer, USA Northeast Province of the Society of Jesus, said we have to ask ourselves where is the justice, in terms of the way technology is used, and to think about the assumptions embedded in technology. He worries that workplace technology, which can produce greater efficiency and productivity, is often deployed without thinking about the impact on workers, who sometimes suffer devastating impacts. He urged the audience to start by thinking about the experience of the worker.

Erica Kochi, Executive Director on Innovation and Co-founder of UNICEF Innovation, noted that seven years ago, there was no good technology solution aimed at the poorest of the poor, and the only common denominator was the text message. Her group has focused on building its own solutions using text messages, and noted that even though there are very inexpensive Android phones, the OS was built for people with a data plan, not for those living on less than $2 a day. "If we're going to build products and services for people who are not us, we need to think about it from their point of view," she said.

Hanna talked about the "false choice between purpose and profit, between mission and product," and said that mission-driven cultures are better places to work, engender greater loyalty, and help build enduring companies. Kochi said you can do both, and said the core business model needs to be one aligned with social responsibility, which should not be something that is done on the side.

McFarland talked about focusing not only on shareholders, but on all the stakeholders in a company, and used as an example AT&T's Bell Labs before the company's breakup. He is worried about the failure to invest in long-term R&D, and said "we have to change the culture about how we think about business and what it means to be successful."

Library

I was impressed in a later talk by Tony Marx, President of The New York Public Library, who said that, in contrast to the supposition some have that libraries are going away, he saw new technology as offering the greatest opportunity in history for what libraries have always stood for - helping people access information.

He noted that in the past, libraries were held back by the physical and financial constraints of getting people to the collections, but said this is changing.

Libraries can have an impact in three big ways, he said. The first is just by connecting people, and he noted that one-third of Americans don't have Internet connectivity at home, but libraries can also serve to train people how to use computers, as well as how to code.

He said that while today's search engines are "unbelievable," they have limitations, and noted that a lot of the basic quality information produced by millennia of effort still isn't available. He said his vision is to offer patrons of the library "every book, every image, every document, and every archive anywhere in the world for free."

It all comes back to the old-fashioned notion of a library as a foundation, Marx said, and urged us to imagine if all of the talent in the world had the ability to learn, create, and innovate however they chose. "We have the tools to make it unstoppable," he said. "Let's do it."

Gods in Boxes: Almighty Algorithms and Hidden Values

Oren Boiman, Co-founder and CEO of Magisto, which uses AI to edit videos, said that "computers are becoming more and more black boxes," with algorithms created by neural networks beating the best algorithms designed by programmers. Though these algorithms can make decisions far better than humans, no one understands quite how they do so.

Vivienne Ming, Co-founder and Executive Chair of Socos, which sells software that helps children learn by sending one recommendation a day to their parents, talked about creating intelligent algorithms. She said that a lot of the work with deep neural networks depends on training sets, and talked about a face-recognition algorithm that didn't recognize black faces because of an inherent bias in the training. "Computers are just like people," she said. "It depends on how your raise them. "

Yahoo Chief Scientist Ron Brachman, said that although we're using anthropomorphized terms to describe machines, there is still a fundamental difference between humans and computers right now. People make decisions based on their needs and desires, which is very different than the way computational systems make decisions these days.

Boiman explained how in most of these "black boxes" everything is connected, and small changes in input can make big and sometimes chaotic differences in results, such as when videos going viral. He said this makes things unpredictable, and it's hard to trace things back to what happened initially. Brachman noted just as we have no way to control what children learn, the same is true for computational mechanisms.

Intelligent Business Machines

The discussion of AI and the ethical issues that arise continued in another panel with the leaders of some more specialized software companies. Babak Hodjat, Co-founder and Chief Scientist of machine learning company Sentient Technologies, said the question of ethics is a bit of a distraction when it comes to AI, and that ethics also impacts all sorts of other technologies, ranging from smartphones to FICO scores.

George John, Chairman and Founder of programmatic advertising company Rocket Fuel, noted the advantages of technology, and said "If AI is really working, people should get home earlier." He talked about the need for new management skills, and managing both people and smart machines. He also talked about looking for applications of AI that aren't just suited to large companies, but could benefit individuals as well.

Jag Duggal, SVP of Product Management for audience measurement company Quantcast, said that these are tools designed to make us more productive, get more things done, and augment our capacity. He said there is a myriad of innovation and productivity that can come out of this, and said that though there are fears about the technology getting too good, he is much more concerned about the limits of technology.

He was particularly concerned about incentives, and what happens when machine learning algorithms end up following the wrong incentives. For instance, he noted how in the online ad placement market, ecommerce vendors were giving credit to the last ad a person saw before placing an order. This results in more ads being targeted after a person has already visited an ecommerce site, and often after someone has decided to buy; in other words, when the ad may be wasted. Quantcast is trying to set better examples, he said.

Jon Stein, Founder and CEO of AI-based investment company Betterment, talked about the good that technology can do, and agreed it was important to set clear incentives. He talked about following fiduciary standards, such as acting in your customer's best interest, and said transparency has a big role to play, so people can understand where conflicts can occur.

Stein said technology will make it harder to be a criminal over time, but Duggal said he is more skeptical, because crooks have technology as well. Still, he is impressed by the potential of technology, and cited an example of a project from Google where an AI can identify cancers in moles on skin. He said he is worried about a "misframing" of the issue by opponents of technology.

Michael J. Miller's Forward Thinking Blog: forwardthinking.pcmag.com
Michael J. Miller is chief information officer at Ziff Brothers Investments, a private investment firm. From 1991 to 2005, Miller was editor-in-chief of PC Magazine, responsible for the editorial direction, quality and presentation of the world's largest computer publication.
Until late 2006, Miller was the Chief Content Officer for Ziff Davis Media, responsible for overseeing the editorial positions of Ziff Davis's magazines, websites, and events. As Editorial Director for Ziff Davis Publishing since 1997, Miller took an active role in...
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